A PEEK AT PLUTO

It's Science Nerd Time!
By Gregory Jacobs-Roseman (Composer-Lyricist)

Left: Charon. Right: Pluto.

So, this probably comes as a surprise to no one, but being the nerd that I am, I love all things outer space. The final frontier, as it were, is the very stuff of the human imagination: larger than our puny brains can comprehend and filled with beautiful structures and anomalies that seem to defy the very laws of physics. Yet, as fascinated as we are by the vast expanse of universe outside our home planet, due to lack of funding, proper technology, etc. we have done very little tactile exploration of it, instead we’ve gazed at most of space from the safety of our home planet through our various telescopes and imaging devices, all of which have their many limitations.

That is why what happened this week was so exciting: when New Horizons completed its nine-year journey to the outskirts of our solar system and sent back the first-ever high resolution images of the dwarf planet Pluto and its largest moon, Charon.

This is what Pluto looks like!

 And its moon: Charon! 

Wow. Just look at that. The first clear glimpse humanity has ever seen of Pluto. We are finally able to associate an image with a new world we have heard of for a long time. It’s truly astounding. Before these images, all we knew about what Pluto looked like were these blurry images taken from afar by the Hubble Telescope:

1994 image of Pluto and Charon from the Hubble Telescope.

2006 Hubble image.

But now as the outskirts of our solar system come into focus with New Horizons, we are beginning to learn more about our little neighborhood here in the Milky Way Galaxy, and how it came to be. As New Horizons continues to fly past Pluto and into the Kuiper Belt (a ring of debris – mostly ice and rock – past Pluto at the edge of the solar system that is considered by many to be the stuff planets were made from) we may learn even more about where we came from.

Now of course, this new interest in Pluto has reignited the debate over whether Pluto should again be considered a planet or remain a “dwarf planet” as it was reclassified in 2006. After the 2005 discovery of Eris, another dwarf planet and Kuiper Belt Object that happens to be larger than Pluto, Pluto’s planetary status was called into question.

Though I have nostalgia for the days growing up when Pluto was considered the 9th planet, I have to say I totally understand why Pluto is and should remain a dwarf planet. Its size alone is not the only anomaly that sets Pluto apart from the other planets in our solar system. Pluto’s orbit for one, is unlike the other planets. It does not orbit the sun on the same flat plane at the rest of the planets, but rather at an angle of about 17 degrees. In addition, its orbit is elliptical rather than circular, meaning at times it is closer to the sun than Neptune.

Pluto's orbit at an angle from the other planets. Image from Wikipeida.

Eris shares these characteristics – strengthening the argument that it is indeed a KBO and not a full-fledged planet.

Eros & Pluto's orbits. Image also from Wikipedia.

Add the fact that center of gravity between Pluto and Charon cause the two tidally-locked bodies to orbit a point in space in between the two of them rather than Charon orbiting Pluto itself further distances Pluto from the definition of a true planet.

Still, these images we’ve seen so far have totally captured my inner child’s imagination. As a kid in summer camp I would look at the stars through high-powered telescopes, staring at little dots in the sky, barely making out Saturn’s rings or Mars’s red coloring, fascinated by the vast expanse of space and the myriad of celestial bodies out there. The New Horizons mission has brought me back to that state of enchantment and wonder I once had as a kid.

Planet or not, I still can’t get over what we have achieved as a human race this week. It’s truly an exciting time for science, and I hope this inspires a new wave of young people to look up at the stars and wonder what we can do next to further understand this universe in which we live. NASA may be under the budgetary knife as of recent years, but there’s no stopping the natural human instinct to explore the unknown.

Any excuse to include some West Wing.

GREGORY JACOBS-ROSEMAN is a composer/lyricist and theatrical sound designer. His musical Save The Date: A Wedding Road-Trip Musical won the Overall Excellence Award for a Musical in the 2013 New York International Fringe Festival. gregjr.com
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